“Not in that way, precisely, though I have never liked her, as you know. I have somehow felt all the time that she and Stapleton and La Planta were playing some deep game, and I believe they are playing it still, whatever it may be. How odd she should have invited us to tea on her house-boat that day at Henley, and been so amiable, and yet that so soon afterwards----” She checked herself abruptly, and nestled closer to her lover. The pressure of his strong arm seemed to give her confidence, restore her courage. After all, she reflected, so long as they were together, what could anything matter? And then, carried away suddenly by her emotion, she flung her arms about his neck and kissed him again and again. The sun was setting when at last they rose and prepared to go back to the village, a couple of miles distant, where they had left their car. “Why,” Preston said, suddenly producing a letter from his pocket, “I forgot to tell you, dear, I received this from George just before we came out. He is staying in town during August, as I think I told you, and he says he has been again to the house with the bronze face. While there he was informed that Mrs. Timothy Macmahon, to whom Lord Froissart left his fortune, is now in London and has a strange story to tell. Stothert told George that Mrs. Macmahon was greatly upset on hearing that Froissart had bequeathed everything to her, and that she is anxious to transfer the greater part of the fortune to Froissart’s rightful heir, his eldest daughter, Mrs. Ferdinand Westrup, who lives with her husband in Ceylon. Mrs. Macmahon admits, he says, that she was on terms of intimacy with Froissart, who used to visit her in Cashel, her home in Tipperary, but she declares that was no reason for him to leave his entire fortune to her, especially as she has a comfortable income of her own.” He unfolded the letter and read parts of it aloud to Yootha as they strolled along the heather. The paragraph which interested her most, ran as follows: “... Stothert also told me Mrs. Macmahon had told him that Froissart, for some time before he took his life, had been threatened with exposure of his private life if he refused to continue to pay increasingly large sums of money to certain persons who were persecuting him....” Yootha put her hand impulsively on her lover’s arm. “Charlie!” she exclaimed, “that is exactly what Cora told me she thought might have been the reason of Lord Froissart’s suicide. She had heard rumors of his intimacy with some woman in Ireland, and that there was possibility of a big scandal, and she also told me Lord Froissart possessed such a sensitive nature that she could not imagine what would happen if the scandal ever came to a head. And now I have an idea. Don’t you think it possible Vera Froissart may have discovered her father’s secret, and that the shock of the discovery may have driven her, for very shame, to end her life?”